Contemporary Literary Criticism | O'Brian, Patrick - Barbara Everett (review date 4 September 1998)

Barbara Everett (review date 4 September 1998)

SOURCE: “A Genuine Romancer,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4979, September 4, 1998, p. 10.

[In the following review, Everett offers a positive assessment of The Hundred Days.]

Manifestly successful at last, often described now as the greatest historical novelist of the century, and awarded prizes and honours as well as accolades, Patrick O'Brian still doesn't convince quite everybody. For some old admirers, the excitement has not survived a second reading; there are readers who call him second-rate on the first. What is lacking is real agreement as to what the writer is first- or second-rate at doing.

Part of the confusion may derive from uncertainty as to what fiction really is. The novel, though highly reputed, is a late development—merely an offshoot of Romance, the non-naturalistic form which dominated Europe for 1,000 years before Shakespeare and a hundred or two after....

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